(Retro Report): On an October Friday in 1957, Americans discovered that while they had been busy making weekend plans, their country had become the tortoise to the Soviet Union hare. Soviet scientists that day shot into orbit the first artificial Earth satellite, a beeping metallic ball not quite 2 feet in diameter that circled the globe every hour and a half at 18,000 mph. It was called Sputnik, “traveling companion” in Russian.
Baker, 93 when he died, was a deadline artist, too. But he approached the world at a 45-degree angle, tending toward whimsy and japery in some 5,000 “Observer” columns that he wrote for The Times across 36 years.
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